Raúl Rosende will be in conversation with Dr Annette Idler on his 26 years of facilitating negotiations between authorities and non-state armed groups and verification and monitoring of ceasefires. Before his current posting in Colombia, Raúl Rosende was the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for northern Syria between 2014 and 2016; the Head of Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), in Damas, Syria (2013-2014) and in Yemen (2010-2013). From 2008 to 2010 he was the UNDP Peace Advisor in Palestine, and between 2008 and 2010 led OCHA in Colombia, where he had previously served as advisor to the Resident Coordinator and Program Coordinator. He has also worked on UN missions in Afghanistan and Guatemala.

Dr Aldo Civico will be "in conversation" with Dr Annette Idler, discussing his work on the anti-mafia movement in Sicily, groups in the Western Balkans and Syria, and paramilitaries in Colombia from a civil society perspective as anthropologist.

Aldo Civico is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University and director of International Institute for Peace. He was director of the Center for International Conflict Resolution at Columbia University.

Dr Scilla Elworthy will be in conversation with Dr Annette Idler about her work as aworld-renowned peace activist on understanding and responding to violent non-state groups from a human perspective.

Dr Elworthy set up Peace Direct in 2003 in order to support local peace-builders in conflict areas. Prior to that, she served as executive director to the Oxford Research Group, an NGO she founded in 1982 to develop effective dialogue between nuclear weapons policy-makers worldwide and their critics, for which she was nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 2003 she was awarded the Niwano Peace Prize. From 2005 she also advised Peter Gabriel, Desmond Tutu and Richard Branson in setting up The Elders. She is a member of the World Future Council and co-founded Rising Women Rising World.

On 2 October, the Colombian people rejected the peace deal that the Colombian government had reached with the FARC after 52 years of internal armed conflict. Shortly afterwards President Santos was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In this round table discussion, the three speakers will put these recent events into the larger context to reflect on Colombia’s road towards sustainable peace.

Reconciliation: Utopia or necessity in a peace process. The Colombian experience

Ingrid Betancourt Pulecio is a Colombian politician, former senator and anti-corruption activist. She was kidnapped by FARC on 23 February 2002 while campaigning for the presidency of Colombia and was rescued by Colombian security forces six and a half years later along with 14 other hostages. She has received multiple international awards.

This talk on the global CVE Agenda will highlight some of the challenges and opportunities confronting governments and the multilateral system in the face of a violent extremist threat that is both more global and localized than ever.

In the last decade, maintaining peace and security has become complicated by an increase in the violence perpetrated no longer exclusively by national armies and armed oppositions but also by an increasingly assertive and brutal range of hybrid actors, such as illegal armed groups, criminal organisations, and transnational networks of illicit trafficking operating in countries including Afghanistan, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali, Myanmar, Honduras, El Salvador, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, sometimes affecting entire regions such as the Sahel or parts of the Middle-East. At the same time, traditional armed conflicts have evolved. Complex insurgencies flourish in peripheral regions where the central state’s presence is scarce or flimsy - perfect conditions for groups like Al-Shabaab, Boko Haram and ISIL to operate and control large swaths of territory.Understanding the changing character of armed groups presents novel analytical and practical challenges for UN entities and other international organisations and partners. The UN’s engagement with these armed groups is still developed on an ad hoc basis or is driven by mandates and operational priorities which limits its efficacy. In this launch event we will discuss these challenges and reflect on their implications for changes in armed conflict more broadly.

In a conversation with Dr Annette Idler, Mr Villalobos will share his experience as guerrilla leader and the motivations for engaging in peace negotiations with the Salvadorian government. Discussing the challenges the guerrillas faced during the process that led to the signing of the peace agreement, he will reflect on lessons for solving contemporary armed conflicts that involve violent non-state groups as well as on negotiations with gangs in Central America today.

Joaquín Villalobos is the former leader of the Salvadorian guerrilla People's Revolutionary Army and later became one of the main military strategists of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front.He is signatory of the peace agreement of El Salvador which was signed in Mexico in 1992. Joaquin is member of the Inter-American Dialogue, Washington, the Friends of the Interamerican Democratic Charter of the Carter Center, and the Advisory Council of the first UNDP Report on Citizen Security. He works as a consultant on conflict in Sri Lanka, Philippines, Bosnia, Afghanistan and Colombia. He is the former security adviser to the Mexican government and currently adviser to the Colombian government on the peace process, as well as to “Inter-Mediate” a London-based conflict mediation NGO led by Jonathan Powell.

During the Cold War, many rebel movements adopted a revolutionary agenda, with a Marxist or socialist orientation. A large qualitative literature contends that revolutionary rebels were generally high quality ones, but their overall impact has yet to be investigated systematically. We find that civil wars where the main rebel actor was a socialist revolutionary group, took the form of highly demanding irregular wars rather than conventional or symmetric, non-conventional wars; they lasted longer and produced more fatalities on average. However, and contrary to our expectations, we also find that rebel quality failed to translate into positive outcomes: socialist revolutionary rebels tended to be defeated at a higher rate compared to other rebels--hence a “Marxist Paradox.” To account for it, we argue that states challenged by socialist revolutionary rebels successfully stepped up their game by both drawing from substantial external assistance and launching counter-mobilization campaigns. Our analysis suggests the usefulness of incorporating rebel political identity in the study of civil war and historicizing it. We also point to the state-building dimension of civil wars implicating revolutionary rebels and stress the indirect ways in which they shaped conflict. We conclude by drawing implications for the latest wave of revolutionary rebellion, the jihadi one.

Stathis Kalyvas is Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science and Director of the Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence. He is the author of The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2006) The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe (Cornell University Press, 1996), and Modern Greece (Oxford University Press, 2015), as well as the co-editor of Order, Conflict & Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

As Leader of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, Lord Alderdice played a significant role in the Talks on Northern Ireland including negotiation of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. He was the first Speaker of the new Northern Ireland Assembly and on retirement in 2004 was appointed to the Independent Monitoring Commission, overseeing normalization of security activity in Northern Ireland.

Benny Wenda is a West Papuan independence leader, International Spokesman for the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), and founder of the Free West Papua Campaign. He lives in exile in the United Kingdom. In 2003 he was granted political asylum by the British Government following his escape from custody while on trial in West Papua.

Kai Htang Lashi is the spokesperson on Foreign Affairs for the Kachin National Organisation (KNO), formed by exile Kachin in the wake of a ceasefire between the Kachin Independence Organisation/Army (KIO/A) and the Burmese military regime in the 1990s. This talk will provide a Kachin perspective on the insurgent group KIO/A, which has been fighting for greater autonomy of Kachin State since the early 1960s.